Learning to lead: Reinscribing citizenship through out-of-school education for social change

• In Event: Coalition Building, Activism and Education in South Asia

Proposal

This article explores out-of-school social service and civic engagement programs for children from elite professional and business managerial family backgrounds in urban India. The study that forms the basis of this article consisted of over 100 hours of non-participant observation across four online programs on community service, social entrepreneurship, and policy research and advocacy, as well as interviews with 20 students who participated in these programs. I examine the roles that these programs encouraged students to take on in public life, the toolkit for ‘social change’ that they provided to students, and privileged young people’s subjective understandings of participating in social change. I also explore what these discourses and practices of out-of-school education for social change imply for the relationship between democracy and meritocracy in contemporary India.

I identify three common themes in how these programs defined leadership, namely, (i) knowledge of technocratic strategies for social change, (ii) commitment to developing professional and entrepreneurial skills and habits, and (iii) a ‘passion’ for social change as the defining feature of one’s identity and personal narrative. Program instructors positioned students as always-already ‘leaders’ and ‘changemakers’, clearly demarcating them from a vast number of less advantaged others who are in need of leadership and change. Students, in turn, drew on prior knowledge and program messaging to conceptualize their initiatives for social change and self change as mutually constitutive and beneficial. Instructors and students alike framed inherited material, social, and cultural advantages–or ‘privilege’–as the source of their ‘passion’ and ‘capability’ for leading positive social change. My analysis pays particular attention to how references to ‘passion’ both obscured the salience of ‘privilege’ and distinguished students’ ‘authentic’ social change endeavors from those undertaken for narrower instrumental gains related to bolstering social status. I situate these understandings of leadership in relation to the visions of modernity espoused by postcolonial India’s urban-metropolitan, upper-caste, English-speaking elites and the heightened expectations of individual self-improvement that accompanied economic liberalization and India’s integration into the global economy beginning from the late 1980s. I illustrate how the discourse and practices of out-of-school education for social change advance the upper-class and -caste young person’s moral claims to elite status by framing their commitments to self change and ‘passion’ for social change as vital resources for furthering social equality.

Prior research shows that India’s upper classes are seeking distinction by opting for schools that inculcate global, cosmopolitan outlooks (Gilbertson 2014; 2016) and ease admission to leading international universities (Rizvi 2014). The popularity of out-of-school educational enrichment activities has received relatively little scholarly attention in comparison. The programs examined for this study are part of a large and growing ecosystem of educational services that promise to help children become more ‘well rounded’ and capable of thriving in the ‘real world’ that comes after school and college. These services include securing internships in professional workplaces, programs for developing leadership and entrepreneurship, training in skill areas like communication and critical thinking, and structured introductions to a range of academic fields like business, management, biomedical and data sciences, programming, robotics, and the liberal arts. Students interviewed for this study routinely referred to their uptake of out-of-school educational enrichment as ‘profile building’, or, a set of practices aimed at enhancing one’s academic and extracurricular accomplishments to impress college admissions committees and future employers. In particular, programs focusing on ‘social change’ or ‘social impact’–such as those offering opportunities to volunteer, fundraise and campaign for various social causes–were understood as a means of ‘giving back’ to society and becoming the socially conscious individuals who will ‘stand out’ in holistic review admissions processes of selective universities. As such, these programs are salient sites for examining how socially and economically powerful youth accrue merit and secure their claims to elite status.

The pursuit of out-of-school social change activities by youth in this study may also be traced to the past and present of private philanthropy and social service in India. Practices of service and charity during India’s colonial and postcolonial periods were closely linked with movements for independence and nation building (Watt 2005). The decades following economic liberalization have seen a steady rise in corporate philanthropy, the number and reach of NGOs, and elites’ participation in urban governance (Subramanian 2022; Shankar 2023). In keeping with the neoliberal turn in policy and public discourse following economic liberalization, the rhetoric and strategies of social service have become increasingly infused with idioms of individual initiative, enterprise, and innovation (Gooptu 2013; Irani 2019). Against this backdrop, young people’s participation in structured, adult-guided opportunities for creating social change represent rich and novel grounds for examining how elites imagine their role in national development.

This research article responds to calls for greater critical scrutiny of elite educational practices and the role that commitments to equality and justice play in the production and maintenance of social inequality (Swalwell 2013; Howard and Kenway 2015). Studies from various national contexts have shown how elite schools evade criticism about their role in the reproduction of privilege through verbal commitments to social equality and by offering community outreach, engagement, and service programs for their students (Kenway and Fahey 2015). In the context of India, Sriprakash, Qi, and Singh (2017) have demonstrated how the discourse and practice of community service in one elite private school served to justify inequality and position the schools and its students as responsible for addressing inequality. I build on this research by examining the role of non-school educators and privileged youth in co-constructing discourses of privileged altruism and merit. I conceptualize the students interviewed for this study as occupying an ambivalent and complex location in globalizing markets for credentials and jobs; one that is characterized by substantial class and caste privileges alongside financial and legal constraints on international mobility. By tracing my observations about their educational investments to the historically specific conditions of dis/advantage in India (e.g., colonialism, caste) and contemporary social hierarchies at different scales (e.g., regional, transnational, global), I aim to deepen our understanding of elite subjectivities in the Global South.

Author

• Swati Puri, Harvard University Graduate School of Education